“I love my pubic hair but I didn’t start by loving it,” says Dorothy, 22, from Melbourne. Like most women, her introduction to pubic hair came hand-in-hand with an introduction on how to remove it. It wasn’t until she went through cancer treatment at the age of 18 that she realised how much of a privilege it was to grow hair. Now, she sees her body hair as a symbol of health, confidence and beauty.

The relationship women have with their body hair is complicated. For decades, pop culture, porn and advertising have given us strict – and narrow – expectations of what is desirable and acceptable for a woman’s body to look like, expectations that have become deeply ingrained. “Body hair removal for women has a compliance rate of over 95 per cent,” Professor Breanne Fahs told Dazed last year. “That’s extraordinary for something with no health benefit. It’s hard for 95 per cent of people to brush their teeth.”

However conversations around pubic hair might be shifting in recent times. 2025 was heralded as the return of the bush, with pubes being spotted on high fashion runways, in SNL skits, and in song lyrics. Meanwhile Skims dropped released a line of merkins and pro-bush influencers took over TikTok. On an individual level, women like Dorothy are having their own reckonings with their body hair and unpacking their relationships to it, from race and gender identity, to sexuality and sex work.

Below, six Naarm, Australia-based women share their experiences and relationships with their pubic hair, and insights into maintaining a positive mind-set.

Dorothy, 22

“I love my pubic hair but I didn’t start by loving it. My introduction to body hair came with an introduction to its removal. When I was a teenager I shaved off all my pubes because when you’re 16, 17, we’re all kind of complicit in it. 

When I was 18 I had cancer, and so I lost all my hair. Head, armpits, pubes. I remember hair was such a big thing to me, and so it was like this weird double-edged sword where me and my mates would kind of joke about the fact I didn’t have to shave my pubes anymore. But I felt so stripped of femininity, so naked, and not in a sexy way, in a I-was-missing-something way. So then when it started to grow back, I was like ‘I never want to get rid of you again’. 

It’s such a privilege that I can grow hair. For me it also marks being healthy. You don’t understand how lucky you are to grow hair and be hygienic in that way. It’s like this mother nature thing, I just think it’s beautiful. The coolest people I know have body hair, the coolest, sexiest people I know.”

Ange, 22

“I like my bush. I like the way it looks. I feel weird without having any hair, but I also don’t want too much hair, so I’ve found a nice middle ground.

I think I had this very strong association with the idea that pubic hair was gross and dirty. I feel like especially being Black, the obsession is a bit deeper. What I’ve observed in the women around me is that it comes from a really internal place of ‘I cannot be seen as unkempt and I cannot be seen as masculinised’. 

I’m a pretty feminine presenting person in general, and so I think from an outsider’s perspective it is pretty jarring to see me with such intense body hair. But I like being soft and feminine in that way and still having body hair because I don’t think that takes away from femininity in any way, [and] it doesn’t make you unhygienic. I think the idea that in order to be feminine, you have to be bald is like an infantilisation of femininity. And it’s gross.”

Alice, 20

“For me, there’s a comfortability when you fully grow out your pubic hair, it becomes really soft at the edges. But when I was in a relationship and felt a pressure to chop it down, the hairs were blunted so it was sort of weaponised against me. It was this constant cycle of shaving, moisturising and putting on a performance so well that it kind of mitigates the thing between your legs, the way you were born, sort of denying the existence of naturality. 

I think being a trans woman, I feel there’s the dual thing of you have to be feminine but you also have to prove, to verify, the authenticity of your femininity. 

I think that the way to combat that is if you are dating a person who might typically have more traditional conservative ideas of gender theory, just push what they’ll accept at the immediate start. Present as who you are and if they can’t handle it then you’ve lost out on nothing.”

Saskia, 25

“I love my pubic hair a lot. I’m really proud to have it. But I don’t feel wholeheartedly comfortable sharing it with others, in the sense that I have my bikini line lasered. 

I think that society, and porn especially, plays on this idea that women need to look so different from men. It’s not just two humans, it’s men [who] have so much hair, and a lack of hair is a marker of femininity, even though it’s so incongruent with what it actually means to be a human, let alone a woman. I feel frustrated that I succumbed to this social ideology before I allowed myself to develop a deeper relationship with myself. Before I understood my womanhood, I’d already begun erasing it. And there was ease to it, there are elements of it that I love, but if I ever wanted a period in life where I really just wholeheartedly embrace my body, I can’t. 

To younger people, I would say wait before doing anything irreversible. Really practice looking at yourself objectively before you put on any social or peer based expectations.”

Kayla Moon, 30

“I feel like I have a very healthy relationship with [my pubic hair]. I think being bisexual, having years of my life where I felt deeply non-binary, it’s always been a tool to explore different versions of myself. I've tried it all, you know, and now I feel like at 30 years old I’m at a very comfortable, happy place with it. 

Being a sex worker in the past, I’ve spent so much time being naked in front of strangers. I kept quite a thick V-shape triangle and then the lips all clean because a lot of men in brothels have some kind of problematic relationship to pubic hair. I was like, ‘I’m already doing so much vulnerability work here, I am not going to porn-star myself for anyone’. I was pretty staunch on having a bush at the brothel, I never fully shaved it. 

I love not having much hair on my vulva because I get more sensitive during sex. Where I’m at now with fully bald wax with some growing back, I only ever do when I’m in a really deep relationship where I’m in love with someone. People don’t get that until I’ve learned that they don’t have a problematic relationship with it.” 

Haley, 24

“I have a real relationship with perfection, especially in the way that manifests as a ‘perfect feminine’. I’m Arab, Lebanese, and I grew up in countries where the girls around me were Scandinavian or Central European, so I was always hairier. Once I hit puberty I just felt really embarrassed about it.

I have placed myself in a bit of a pigeon hole attached to my ‘classic femininity’. If I doll myself up and someone’s looking at me in a negative way, I twist and be like, ‘they’re so fucking jealous of me’. When the same thing exists if you see a woman wearing body hair, you’re still in a way deeply jealous of their capacity to exist shamelessly in their body. 

I do feel like the fact that I feel such deep shame in growing out my body hair, especially around my pubic area, is a symptom of a much larger thought pattern that I am starting to outgrow. I’m hoping that over time, as I become more of an adult woman in my brain, I’ll feel more comfortable existing as an adult woman in my body too.”